Inter-being a Cranefly

non-fiction

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix ‘inter-’ with the verb ‘to be,’ we have a new verb, inter-be. — Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step

     For six years I did my writing in an eight-by-twelve-foot shed on the edge of protected old growth forest on the Oregon Coast. Because my walls were uninsulated plywood, a desultory parade of many kinds of insects made their way indoors as I worked, crossing my pages at a pace so tentative they seemed preoccupied, like humans reading a manuscript page. Were they muses? Were they silently editing me? When they stayed on a page so long they seemed to trust it, should I trust it, too? Months passed, small trespassers came and went, and none slowed enough to dictate content to my pages until a day midway through the winter my first marriage failed. I’d eaten a warm buttered muffin, poured a fresh cup of tea, and found the latest blank white surface to engage me doubly daunting given my newly blank love life — when an emaciated five-legged cranefly, trailing a filthy shred of spider’s silk, dragged itself onto the arid plane of white, lowered its needle-thin head and thorax slowly down, even more slowly folded its forelegs to its chest, till it was bowing steady as a Muslim brought low by the muezzin, and the field of white somehow blossomed and we began to inter-be:

     In the name of the Merciful, the Compassionate, the dying cranefly’s movements somehow sang in the silence. I have come to the geometric middle of nowhere, my five legs useless as fingers on a cripplingly arthritic hand, my head flush to this arid white plane to call down mercy upon every soul who kneels as I must now kneel: the race horse with three legs buckled at the knee, fourth leg splintered, awaiting the final gun; the clam-digger on her knees happily attacking an empty beach with a uselessly small child’s shovel she found; the Russian boy kneeling before the rifles of two Afghani soldiers, gazing into the grave he’s about to fill; the golfer on all fours in deep rough, swears he saw where his damned ball landed; the gutshot elk, having outrun its hunter, bleeding out on his useless knees; and me, fearing death not at all as I kneel all the way down,

     to suck, with my proboscis,

     at a last infinitesimal smear of butter.